Marie-Anne Detourbay
Marie-Anne Detourbay | |
|---|---|
 Marie-Anne Detourbay, future comtesse de Loynes, by Amaury-Duval - Musée d'Orsay | |
| Born | 18 January 1837 |
| Died | 21 January 1908 (aged 71) |
| Nationality | French |
| Other names | Jeanne De Tourbey and The Madonna of the Violets |
| Occupation(s) | Courtesan, Salonnière |
| Title | Comtesse de Loynes |
| Spouse |
Count Victor Edgar de Loynes
(m. 1872) |
Marie-Anne Detourbay (18 January 1837 – 21 January 1908)[1] was a French demimonde and salon-holder. She was a famous courtesan during the Second Empire, and also hosted a literary salon which had some influence during the Second Empire and the Third Republic.[2] She is also known for her relationship with Jules Lemaître.
Biography
[edit]Marie-Anne Detourbay, was born in rue Neuve (later rue Gambetta), Reims to a poor and large family. Her mother was a cloth burler[3] and her father unknown.[4] From age eight she was employed to rinse champagne bottles.[5] She moved to Paris when she was 15, where under the name of Jeanne de Tourbey[1] and soon became part of the Parisian demimonde.[6]
Early life
[edit]Her name seems to get lost in translation or carry some inconsistencies as she also spelt her name differently at times. She continued to hold her mother's surname of Detourbey, or at times wrote it as "De Tourbay" or "Detourbay"[7]. Despite her many names she is commonly known as Jeanne De Tourbey or Marie-Anne Detourbey.
She lived most of her life in poverty until her mother was briefly remarried. Detourbey's mother then remarried to a man named Rixe who was a carpenter.[8] With this new marriage brought wealth and brought ease to Jeanne and her mother. Jeanne was then able to pursue an education up to the age of 13 until Rixe dies.[8]. Detourbey then begins to work in a Champagne house rinsing bottles to overcome their once occurring state of poverty.[9]
Detourbey took the first opportunity she could to leave Reims, which presented itself as her friend leaving to Paris. The friend issued to Jeanne to come with her to Paris, and with enough money saved up she and her friend left to Paris.[8] At 15 she was making a name for herself in the streets of Paris. She mastermind her way into high class social gatherings and balls. It was at this age she had a documented exchange with Alexander Dumas[10],
Jeanne: "You know I have come to Paris to educate myself. I want to learn."
Dumas: "And why? For what need had so pretty a child of education?"
Jeanne "Because one day Paris must be at my feet"[10]
Life as Marie-Anne Detourbey
[edit]At one of the socialite events Detourbey would attend, one is where she met Marc Fournier[11], a director at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. He brought her into the limelight and took her in as a muse. She attempted a career as an actress but was short lived[12] as she realized her strengths lie elsewhere. It was through her connections to Marc Fournier and Alexander Dumas Fils that she met other influential figures of the time. One including Arther Meyer, a french writer who became close friends with Detourbey and soon coined her with the name "Lady of the Violets"[12]
Her first protector, Marc Fournier also introduced her to Prince Napoleon, cousin of Napoleon III.[6] Napoleon installed her in a beautiful flat in rue de l'Arcade,[13] close to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.[6] She would host an exclusively male assembly of the Parisian men of letters: Ernest Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Prévost-Paradol and Emile de Girardin.[14][15]
Through her best friend, actress Josephine Clemence Ennery, nicknamed "Gisette"(fr), she met Gustave Flaubert[2] and Khalil-Bey,[16] who fell in love with her. From Tunis, where he went to write Salammbô, Flaubert wrote:
It is not to keep to my promise that I write to you, dear and beautiful neighbor, but because I think of you almost continually! And I have nothing to say to you, nothing else! I swear by your beautiful eyes and hands. [...] In eight days I'm leaving and in three weeks I'll see you again. This is the important thing. With what joy will I rush to your house, and how my heart will beat by pulling your bell! When I am at your feet, on your carpet, we will talk of my journey, if it amuses you. [...] If you knew how I think about your apartment, which contains you, and even the furniture that surrounds you! Have you not since my departure felt, sometimes, like a breath that passed over you? It was something of me, who escaping from my heart, traversing the space, invisibly, and reaching down there! I lived for five weeks with this memory (which is a desire too). Your image kept me company in loneliness, incessantly. I heard your voice through the sound of the waves and your charming face flutters around me, on the hedges of nopals, in the shade of the palm trees and in the horizon of the mountains. It seems to me that I took away from your dear person a kind of emanation which penetrates me, a fragrance of which I am embalmed, which makes me drunk and intoxicates me. I blame you for occupying so much space in my thoughts. When I want to dream of Carthage, it is the rue de Vendome that represents itself.[17]
Around 1862, she met Ernest Baroche fr, son of senior Ministerial Civil Servant Jules Baroche fell in love with her. Ernest himself had been made another Minister of Napoleon III, Master of Petitions at the State Council and Director of Foreign Trade at the Ministry of Agriculture. They would have become engaged but, as Commander of the 12th mobile battalion of the Seine, he was killed in action at the Battle of Le Bourget on 30 October 1870[6] and left her a fortune of 800,000 gold francs (about 2.5 million Euros) and a sugar factory. The director of the factory was retired officer Count Victor Edgar de Loynes.[18]
Countess de Loynes
[edit]In 1872, she married de Loynes,.[19] This marriage gave her access to high society, but the Count soon left for America, where he disappeared. Although the marriage was only nominal, because her husband's family had opposed their union,[18] she carried and kept the use of the name and title of Countess de Loynes.[19] Her visitors became more prestigious; received every day between five and seven o'clock. The celebrities of the Second Empire give way to those of the nascent Third Republic, a new regime which the Countess de Loynes did not like. Her visitors included Georges Clemenceau, Georges de Porto-Riche, Alexandre Dumas fils, Ernest Daudet, Henry Houssaye, Pierre Decourcelle, and soon many young writers and musicians led by Maurice Barrès, who gave her his two books Huit jours chez M. Renan (1890) and Du sang, de la volupté, et de la mort (1894) luxuriously bound by Charles Meunier in 1897.[20] Others included Paul Bourget, Marcel Proust, Georges Bizet and Henri Kowalski.[18]
Between 1880 and 1885, through Arsène Houssaye, she met the critic Jules Lemaître, who was 15 years younger than her. Under his leadership, she founded, the League of the French Homeland in 1899, and became its first president. Encouraging nationalism, they put their political hopes, like other personalities such as the Duchess of Uzès, in General Boulanger and became passionately anti-Dreyfusards.[18] This led to a break with some of her friends including Georges Clemenceau, Georges de Porto-Riche and Anatole France. From then on she received into her home Édouard Drumont, Jules Guérin and Henri Rochefort.[18]
In her latter years she supported the political position of Charles Maurras,[21] and shortly before her death on 21 January 1908, Detourbay helped Maurras and Léon Daudet to found the Royalist newspaper L'Action française by donating 100,000 gold francs.
The Countess of Loynes was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, alongside her parents.
Residences
[edit]Reims
[edit]- 58, rue neuve, (now rue Gambetta), from her birth in 1837
- 16, rue du Cadran-Saint-Pierre (in 1852);
- 8, rue de la Grosse-Écritoire (in 1854, middle-class pension).
Paris
[edit]- Place Royale (Place des Vosges);
- Rue de Vendôme (in 1857);
- 28, rue de l'Arcade (8th arrondissement) (in 1865);
- 53, avenue d'Iéna (in 1886);
- 152, avenue des Champs-Elysées (8th arrondissement) (from 1896).
References
[edit]- ^ a b "Jeanne Loynes (comtesse de, 1837-1908)". data.bnf.fr. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ a b Baldick 1971, p. 237.
- ^ Holden 1950, p. 142.
- ^ "LA COMTESSE DE LOYNES, Gerard Desanges - livre, ebook, epub". www.editions-harmattan.fr (in French). Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ "La comtesse de Loynes : Du Second Empire à l'Action française De Dumas père et fils à Proust". Babelio (in French). Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ a b c d Masaccio (16 October 2010). "Saturday Art: Madame de Loynes by Amaury Duval". Shadowproof. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ Poyet, Thierry (2017). La Gens Flaubert : la fabrique de l'écrivain entre postures, amitiés et théories littéraires [The Flaubert People:the writer's making between postures,friendships and literary theories] (in French). Paris: Modern Letters Minard. ISBN 9782406057420.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ^ a b c Marvaud, Jean (1981). En chemin j'ai rencontré -- [On the way I met --] (in French). Angoulême: J. Marvaud.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ^ Houbre, Gabrielle (2006). Le livre des courtisanes: archives secrètes de la police des mœurs, 1861-1876. Paris: Tallandier. ISBN 978-2-84734-344-1.
- ^ a b "INSIDE STORIES OF COMTESSE DE LOYNES' FAMOUS SALON; Reminiscences of Arthur Meyer, the Famous Editor of The Gaulois, Tell of this Remarkable Woman, Who Played a Great Part in the Literary and Political Life of Paris for Fifty Years -- Anecdotes of Napoleon, Taine, Renan, Flaubert, Saint-Beuve, and Others -- The Inside Story of the Dreyfus Affair, in Which Mme. de Loynes Figured Largely". The New York Times. 1912-03-03. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2025-03-12.
- ^ Houbre, Gabrielle (2006). Le livre des courtisanes: archives secrètes de la police des mœurs, 1861-1876. Paris: Tallandier. ISBN 978-2-84734-344-1.
- ^ a b Marvaud, Jean (1981). En chemin j'ai rencontré -- [On the way I met --] (in French). Angoulême: J. Marvaud.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ^ Guilbert, Cécile (19 July 2014). "Gustave Flaubert à Jeanne de Tourbey". France Culture (in French). Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ "Musée d'Orsay: Amaury-Duval Madame de Loynes". www.musee-orsay.fr. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ "Amaury-Duval - Madame de Loynes". LANKAART (in French). 13 December 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ "Mystery nude's name uncovered 150 years on". BBC. 25 September 2018. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ Gallimard 1980, pp. 813–814.
- ^ a b c d e "La Comtesse de Loynes, biographie par Pierre-Robert Leclercq - Bigmammy en ligne". www.bigmammy.fr (in French). 20 November 2011. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
- ^ a b Goncourt & Goncourt 1971, p. 361.
- ^ Picard Tajan Ader 1986.
- ^ "Marie-Anne Detourbay, condesa de Loynes". Nombres de mujer (in Spanish). 15 November 2018. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
Bibliography
[edit]- Baldick, Robert (1971). Dinner at Magny's. Gollancz.
- Gallimard, ed. (1980). "Lettre à Jeanne de Tourbey du 15 mai 1858". Flaubert : Correspondance, tome 2 Juillet 1851 - Décembre 1858 (in French). Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
- Goncourt, Edmond de; Goncourt, Jules de (1971). Becker, George Joseph; Philips, Edith (eds.). Paris and the Arts, 1851-1896: From the Goncourt Journal. Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801406553.
Marie-Anne Detourbay.
- Holden, Wilfred Herbert (1950). The Pearl from Plymouth: Eliza Emma Crouch, alias Cora Pearl, with notes on some of her celebrated contemporaries. British Technical and General Press.
- Picard Tajan Ader (1986). Tres Beaux Livres Des Xixe Et Xxe Siècles - Manuscrits - Vente a Paris, Hotel Drouot - 4 Juin 1986.
